When Will Women Be on Our Own Side?
“When men are oppressed it’s a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it’s tradition.” — Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Who runs the world? Well, despite how much I want to slay alongside Queen Bey, it’s not girls.
Turns out that 90 percent of people worldwide hold some sort of bias against women. That’s according to the first-ever gender social norm index, an analysis conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which represents more than 80 percent of the world’s population and surveyed data from 75 countries.
“We have come a long way in recent decades to ensure that women have the same access to life’s basic needs as me,” said the head of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office Pedro Conceição in a statement, “but gender gaps are still all too obvious in other areas, particularly those that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality.”
Both men and women still consider men to be better political leaders and executives. This is a major factor in understanding why women have yet to succeed as presidential candidates. Or why there are more Fortune 500 CEOs named Jeffrey than there are women. (source)
Women have made progress, but gender experts suggests that is precisely why there is a backlash. I think most women have long recognized the backlash without the experts, and yet the internalization of misogyny is staggering.
In an effort to make sense of what is happening within the Democratic Party over the last several primary cycles, Jonathan Tamari of the Philadelphia Inquirer tweeted:
But his analysis is not quite right. It’s total white patriarchy identity politics at play. It’s white woman > black man, white* man > woman, moderate centrist man > progressive democratic socialist. You see, it’s only actually about politics when it’s a contest between white men. (And it’s only about perception of lost masculine dominance in the work force and society, never about actual economic policies.) And, this is apparently true for women voters as well as men. White women were a key constituencies in the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Then the digital drop of The Rise of Skywalker (TROS) provided another view of how this is all wrapped up in cultural norms. All the hot takes have resurged, including the “this was the worst ever” criticism that seems so incredibly out-sized for any movie. Many of those hot takes include frustration that Rey survived and Kylo Ren/Ben didn’t. It’s amazing how many women focus on the potential of Ben’s redemption rather than how Rey had the power and option to be more powerfully dark than Kylo and consistently chose not to walk that path. Rey showed that anger and fear doesn’t lead to the dark side; our choices about what to do with our anger and fear do. Rey had more than potential, but instead we focus on Ben?
Kylo Ren is the epitome of fear of lost power. The movies, like the original trilogy (and the broader arc of 1–6) show a classic redemption narrative. And arguably the Star Wars universe has always shown strong women (Leia and Padme) and the last trilogy was particularly rounded out with women leaders (thank you Rian Johnson). Yet many people, women especially, are crying that Ben should have lived because they were in love and just now had the chance to be together. And he could fix things.
Plot point clarification: Rey could both heal and harm (balance). She explained that healing was like lending part of her life force to another. When she healed Kylo Ren she lent her life force. He didn’t have the power to heal her. He made a choice — this is the moment of his redemption, not the battle he waged prior — to give back her life force to heal her. It wasn’t his power. It was hers and only hers.
Rather than recognize that Rey fixed things; Rey had power; there is power in healing; Rey was a leader, even if it looked different, some people would rather it ended with the classic dashing hero saves damsel trope. Ben’s potential mattered more than all of Rey’s past actions and future potential combined. Misogyny (internalized or not) is a hell of a drug.
Where does all this leave us? Our bias against women is evident in our election cycles, even among the liberals, and it’s certainly embedded in our cultural entertainments (Makes me want to rethink the term ‘escapism.’)
The UNDP gave us new, clear data to help us see our biases more clearly. Calling it out when we see it, even on Reddit board of TROS haters, so that others begin to see it, is the work ahead for us all.
*More than aware that Sanders, as a Jew, is only sometimes considered white. And while I could give you a long history on why that is, this isn’t the place.
